CHAPTER 



LIBRARY 



CHEMISTRY OF CELL WALL! 



'* 



MASS. 



Now we shall turn to the more detailed studies of the 

 chemical constituents of microbial cell walls. For this 

 discussion our selection of material is confined almost ex- 

 clusively to yeast and bacterial cell walls. Some ten years 

 ago very little was known about the chemistry of the walls 

 of bacteria. This situation has been rapidly changed so 

 that more is known about the chemical constitution of walls 

 of bacteria than those of any other microorganism, and only 

 a condensed account of the chemistry of bacterial walls can 

 now be given in a single lecture. 



Chemistry of Yeast Cell Walls 



Long before the yeast wall had been isolated as a single 

 morphological entity yeast polysaccharides had been puri- 

 fied and their structures investigated. Glucan from Sac- 

 charomyces cerevisiae and from Candida albicans both con- 

 tain /?(1 -^ 3) and ^(1 -^ 6) glycosidic linkages, but the 



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